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Digital Audio Insider is David Harrell's blog about the economics of music and other digital content. I write from
the perspective of a musican who has self-released four albums with the indie rock band the Layaways.

My
personal website has links to my LinkedIn and Google+ pages and you can send e-mail to david [at] thelayaways [dot] com.

Billboard's Glenn Peoples wonders if some Radiohead fans would've passed on the pre-order if they had known the album had just eight tracks, noting that "these days it's hard to find an album that doesn't have at least ten songs." That true, but I'd argue that longer-album trend (as measured by number of songs and total playing time) that coincided with the rise of the CD format might not be a permanent one. While the CD format remains the biggest seller, as digital album sales increase, maybe artists will feel more free to release shorter works that don't take full advantage of the storage limits of the delivery device. Besides, at nearly 38 minutes, the album certainly isn't skimpy by vinyl standards -- some early Van Halen albums barely broke the 30-minute mark and Springsteen's "Born to Run" is an eight-song classic. Still, I'll admit that eight years of the iTunes store has conditioned me to think individual tracks costs 99 cents (despite the $1.29 pricing for some of them), enough so that I did a quick double take at the "eight songs for nine dollars" price.

"In many cases these publishers are basically getting the revenue off of composers who are dead for a very long time," Mr. Guo said. "The Internet has become the dominant form of communication. Copyright law needs to change with it. We want people to have access to this material to foster creativity. Personally I don’t feel pity for these publishers."

Those who "cling to their old business model," he added, will simply fade away.

But publishers point out that users of the site can miss the benefit of some modern editions that may be entitled to copyright protection -- and thus not part of the public domain -- because of significant changes to the music, such as corrections and editing marks based on years of scholarship about the composer's intention.

This summer, music lovers everywhere will finally be able to do the impossible: legally sell their digital music files and buy other people's used music at a fraction of the price. A group of MIT and Cambridge-based geniuses has solved the most pressing problem of the digital music age and will soon extend invitations to experience the limited early release of ReDigi, the world's first online marketplace to legally recycle, buy and sell, used digital music files.

As I've written here before, the loss of resale value is too often overlooked in discussions about the pricing of digital content. A few years back, I did an analysis of CD and digital album prices relative to used CD values and came to the conclusion that, in general, "digital albums need to be priced approximately three to five dollars below the total cost of the equivalent CD to compensate for the loss of a resale value."

While I'm all for applying the right of first sale to digital content, I have to think that music labels and publishers are going to fight this concept tooth and nail. The user agreements for Amazon MP3 and eMusic, for example, all prohibit the transfer of purchased music files to other parties. (Surprisingly, I can't find explicit language in the iTunes user agreement forbidding the transfer of files to another party, but I assume it's in there somewhere.) ReDigi, however, claims to have come up with a way to make it legal, and is also promising a revenue share of some sort with labels and artists:

Along with giving users the power to recycle their digital music files, the ReDigi's Marketplace also aims to help strengthen the music industry through the ReDigi Foundation program, which grants a share of proceeds from all music sales to both artists and record labels each and every time a track resells.

Lala.com had a similar proposal for sharing 20% of its revenue from CD trades with artists, but never implemented it before the service was sold to Apple and shuttered.

Being a cheapskate, I hate to pay for digital downloads of tracks that I already own. That is, it seems silly to buy an entire album if -- thanks to a compilation album or label/band giveaways -- a couple tracks from it are already sitting in my iTunes library. I realize this attitude seems less than generous to the artists I like, but in the case of my eMusic subscription, it means I'll use the money for other songs/albums.

The workaround, assuming the "album price" is less than the cost of the remaining songs, is to purchase the rest of the album and then fiddle with the track info for the tracks I already owned to create a version of the full album. This can be a tricky process, as a discrepancy for a single piece of information (a different genre for one song, for example) will cause the album to play out of order. And if you have to spend much time on it, it's just not worth the fuss to save 79 cents.

So I'd love to see an "add track to album" feature in iTunes that would: 1. automatically match the song/album info and tags for all of the tracks on the album, and, 2. match the relative volumes of songs coming from sources that were mastered at different levels. (Yes, iTunes already has its "Sound Check" feature, but it doesn't completely correct the latter issue, at least not for me.)